Ascension Parish schools lauded

Advocate staff photo by ADAM LAU -- State Education Superintendent John White, right, presents a check for $150,000 to Ascension Parish School Superintendent Patrice Pujol, left, at East Ascension High School in Gonzales on Thursday. Ascension was recognized for its winning application in the $4 million Believe and Include grant initiative to serve students with disabilities. Pecan Grove Primary School, Carver Primary School, and Gonzales Primary School partnered for the Power Up initiative aimed at increasing academic performance of students with disabilities in language arts and math. Sixteen Ascension Parish schools also were recognized for their designation as Top Gains Schools.

“Because of your efforts, the things that you do every day with our students, so many of our schools have grown at phenomenal rates.” Patrice Pujol, Ascension Parish superintendent

GONZALES — State Superintendent of Education John White told Ascension Parish educators Thursday their achievements can serve as a model for other districts in the state.

White stopped at East Ascension High School on Thursday afternoon to present nearly $300,000 to 18 schools for high achievement in the classroom.

Sixteen of Ascension’s schools — including all four high schools — were honored as Top Gains Schools, meaning the schools hit their growth targets during the 2011-12 school year, White said.

Seventy-five percent of schools in the state showed some growth in their school performance scores, he said. However, “only a few hit their ambitious (growth) targets,” he added.

Each of the 18 schools received $8,453 to be used for educational purposes at the school, and White presented Ascension Parish Superintendent Patrice Pujol with a check for $135,261 to be distributed among the schools.

Pujol told a roomful of educators that the honor was a cause for celebration.

“Because of your efforts, the things that you do every day with our students, so many of our schools have grown at phenomenal rates,” she said.

“We don’t take enough time to look back and say, ‘That works,’ because what you do works,” White said.

White praised Ascension Parish as being one of two districts in the state that are on the verge of being “digital-ready” and for being “on the ball from a technological perspective.” He said the district’s emphasis on teacher collaboration and setting ambitious goals has been key to the district’s success.

White also presented the district a check for $150,000 to be used at three schools in the district to serve as “lead innovators” in assisting achievement by students with special needs.

Pecan Grove Primary, Carver Primary and Gonzales Primary schools were among 85 schools in the state to receive grant funds as part of the Education Department’s Believe and Include initiative, which provides $4 million to develop innovative programs to help students with disabilities.

The three schools, which each will receive $50,000, formed a partnership to join in the Power Up initiative aimed at increasing English and math performance of disabled students. The students will receive iPads loaded with educational applications to aid them in progressing toward mastering the Common Core State Standards.

“I’m so thankful for them for being a beacon and light for the rest of the state,” White said.

Pujol, who said she expects even greater results in the district next year, said Ascension Parish officials seek to make sure every student in the district receives a quality education.

“We know that our kids can do whatever it is we expect them to do,” she said.

Comments

1) Comment by Noel Hammatt - 20/01/2013

JUST SAY NO!!! No more takeovers of s-called "failing schools" because the state accountability doesn't actually measure the quality of the teacher or administration in a school. JUST SAY NO!!! To evaluating teachers based on how well the students do: it is a patently invalid exercise that wrecks havoc on careers, and serves NO useful purpose, since the scores are about as stable as the weather. JUST SAY NO!!! To destroying the budgets of schools for hundreds of thousands of students so that a few students can exercise "choice" to get out of a "failing" school. This latter is doubly absurd, since we know it is neither the quality of the "school" that is failing, nor is it true that we are allowing the lowest scoring students to choose another school. JUST SAY NO!!! To those who would take over our schools for their personal profit. And by the way, tell all of your friends and family and colleagues about this exchange on here. Let us focus on the students, on teaching them each and over day, meeting their needs, academic, emotional, and physical as we journey on a path of learning together. The "reformers" have never understood teaching and learning, maybe because most never even got to be any good at it, and others could wait to get out of the classroom. Everything that can be tested or measured doesn't necessarily matter, and all that matters, cannot necessarily be tested. It is interesting to hear the ridiculous cry of the "reformers" to focus on the students in the classroom, and not on the adults. They don't realize that ALL of their efforts succeed in doing the opposite. Our students are not just test scores. Go tell 'em!

2) Comment by Chinquapin - 19/01/2013

@Noel. I just double checked, and you are right. I was counting free and reduced, while the original author only included free lunch. I did my own research with the 2010-2011 SPS and F/R lunch numbers provided by the state and also found a -.997 correlation with only St. Amant scoring (slightly) higher than expected. With all this said though, where do we go from here? Based on your previous post, you have raised issue with the results from most of Louisiana's highest scoring districts. Which district provides a good model for growth in Louisiana?

3) Comment by Noel Hammatt - 18/01/2013

@Chinquapin: If you look at the charts again and read the article text next to it you will see that those numbers are for free lunch students only. EA High fits right into the pattern that year. Also, as I wrote, the near-perfect correlations were within each of the school levels, elementary, middle, and high. So, all the middle schools were on the same line/same slope and all the High and elementary, same thing. In 2005, right before the hurricane, I had done an analysis that ranked districts across the state by a different method, using the difference between their predicted score and the actual score. The predicted score was determined by your demographics, using income and race. Using average scores for each group, I then mathematically determined what your District Performance Score would be if you were at the state "average: for each of the sub-groups. Across the state, the predicted scores fell within 3 points of the actual scores, on average.. If you did better than your predicted score, you got a positive number. If you did worse, you got a lower score. That year, Ascension School District went from around 7th, I think, to 37th in the state. Since the Department now hides all the data, I can't update it. There are, of course, schools that do better. Often, though, when we see a school that seems to be really breaking the patter, when we enter the school we find some kind of special program, or a GT population within the school. At any rate, thanks for your comments!

4) Comment by Chinquapin - 18/01/2013

@Noel Thank you for providing a different perspective to these articles that is unusual to find in the text of the story. I am a teacher and have been a lurker to this comment section and always look forward to reading your responses. I agree 100% that more student and school performance data from the state needs to be available to the public and also to teachers. However, your broad analysis of Ascension schools has a problem: East Ascension High School. While I am certainly biased towards the high school, it seems to somewhat buck the trend. It is the only high school in the district whose SPS score is consistently and markedly higher than the average of its feeder schools. In fact the link you provided shows that schools with free and reduced lunch of around 33.97% free and reduced lunch score an "A" in their SPS evaluation. EA (an A school) is 41% free and reduced lunch, though based on your link, it should fit in the "B" range. While I agree that poverty is a truly powerful obstacle that must be recognized for its affect on students, I also believe that a school can make a difference, even if you believe it is "not as well as it should be doing." What is most concerning to me is the SPS evaluation formula for next year. Many schools in Ascension who currently have As and ***** in their SPS will lose a significant number of points due to the inclusion of ACT scores (and a few other factors) to evaluate the school. Based on information I have heard from other sources, EA will probably end up scoring a "C" in the new evaluations, thus allowing the voucher program to expand into the school. The ironic thing is that Superintendent White chose to visit EA to give this speech.

5) Comment by Noel Hammatt - 18/01/2013

Congratulations to the teachers and students of Ascension for some recognition. How well is Ascension doing given it's demographics? Actually, not as well as it should be doing. I was going to update a study done in 2008, but the "Powers That Be" in the Department of Education (or those pulling the strings from outside the department) have responded to researchers pointing out the lies and myth-information in Department of Education claims by removing all historical data sets from their website. That's right, researchers were using that data to point out lies, and instead of correcting their lies. they just disposed of the data. In one weekend. In Ascension, prior to the "burning of the books" by DOE, it was discovered that there was a nearly perfect relationship between the percent of students qualifying for free meals, and the school performance scores. What the "Louisiana Believes" crowd has done is convince people that if you move more engaged students into a few of the schools, you can then condemn the other schools, and privatize them in order to make profits for their friends. They don't really change the educational outcomes across the board, they just appear to do this. One of the sloppiest (but effective for them, given the lack of resources in the media to research their claims) techniques they use is to simply dispose of test scores for students who would pull down their scores. Remember the claim about "Louisiana Believes" supporter Leslie Jacobs made that New Orleans now had improved their graduation rates to above the state and national averages? Totally bogus. How did she do it? In part by relying on bogus information from the Department of Education. Imagine what would happen if you took all of those students in Ascension who did not graduate on time, and put them in one school. Guess what would happen? All of your other schools would look great. But wait, what happened to the scores in the school you just put them all in? Easy, you call it a school in transition and don't use it's results when you compile information for the District. Now, the RSD has discovered a number of other useful techniques for disposing of low test scores... one of them is simply to place these students into special programs like AMI where the students suddenly disappear off the roll books. See http://bit.ly/11EhXq9 and the comments. (Advocate article) For a look at how Ascension schools did in relation to their poverty, see http://bit.ly/11D3Hhz and especially note the charts, pretty powerful. Help get transparency for the public dollars spent at the Department of Education by Tweeting to Superintendent John White @LouisianaSupe and tell him to give the public access to data that he had removed from the department website.

6) Comment by Whatnow - 18/01/2013

Congratulations, Ascension Parish Schools!